Flying in the face of instructional design: Rationale for the case study

F L Y I N G IN THE F A C E OF I N ST R U C TIONAL DESIGN: R A T I O N A L E FOR THE C A S E STUDY

ROB WALKER RON LEWIS LOUISE LASKEY Deakin Centre for Education and Change Deakin University

Introduction 1

This paper provides an account of our use of CDROM in a distance education program. Changing Classrooms is a year-long unit of study in Deakin's fourth year Education program in which the course team has been experimenting for ten years with ways of 'breaking the grip of print '2 in distance programs of this kind. This has involved increasing use of photographs, audio and video tape, which in turn has led to the development of quite different tasks. For example, early in the course we ask people to get their students (or a colleague) to photograph them teaching. A selection of these photographs is exchanged with others in the course, who write a commentary on the photographs and return this to the person whose class was photographed. This task locates a number of the tasks that follow--which concern such topics as the educational use of architectural space, the emotions of teaching and learning, the nature of classroom talk--in the teacher's own practice, rather than 'out there' in an abstracted curriculum.

The most recent development in the Changing Classrooms unit has been researching and producing a multimedia case study of a school. 'Hathaway Primary School' is a CDROM, which provides an extensive and diverse collection of material forming the resource basis for a six to eight week period of study (around 70 hours of student time). 'Students' (who are almost all 'teachers') are guided through this material in the expectation that it will 'take them inside' Hathaway, the fictional name given to a real school in Sydney's inner western suburbs. In doing this they have to complete a set of written tasks, which include reporting both the explicit and hidden agenda of a staff meeting, explaining the educational philosophy of a teacher they have observed, writing a

AUSTRALIAN EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER VOLUME 23 No 3 DECEMBER 1996 29

30 W A L K E R , LEWIS & L A S K E Y

paper on evaluation for a conference, and providing briefing notes on multicultural education for a film producer.

In this paper we will provide very little discussion of the multimedia technicalities encountered in producing Hathaway. Rather, our concern is with the educational issues that have arisen from our attempts to become active users of the technology. These issues are not specific to multimedia use, but they become critical as you attempt to become competent educational users.

Multiple technologies Accounts of this kind are often presented within a frame that treats a single technology as an introduced variable and the course itself as a one-dimensional outcome. This frame is readily recognisable by the questions it generates:

• What did it cost?

• Do the students learn better/faster as a result?

• Is it more efficient?

• Could we do it?

• What software would we need? r

The narrative structure of this 'single input/simple outcome' model is one that underlies much vernacular curriculum history and is generally of the type:

- HISTORY (This is what we used to do)

- INNOVATION (Here comes the innovation and isn't it great!)

- CHANGE (This is what we are doing now)

- EVALUATION (Is it better/cheaper/faster? Where is the resistance to change?)

Implici t in this narrative structure are embedded sterotypes of the innovator/researcher as hero, of the institution as endemically conservative and broader assumptions, about the inevitable upward flight of the arrow of progress and an unhelpful conceptual separation of technology into its material and social aspects. Tempting as it is, to tell our story in this form would be perversely to mislead, since Alistair Morgan (1991) has already written a history of our course which emphasises the inextricably entwined nature of its social, political and curriculum aspects with its educational technology. Given the context, we cannot easily or honestly retreat from the demand for a more complex view.

What does this 'more complex view' imply?

F L Y I N G IN T H E F A C E OF I N S T R U C T I O N A L D E S I G N 31

• Rather than seeing the story in terms of the impact of a single technical innovation ('Here comes multimedia'), we prefer to see it in terms of a conjunction, even a collision, between multiple technologies, each of which has material and social aspects.

• The first of these lie in the nature of the innovation itself, for digital technologies are inherently complex as media. We argue that they are not just a way of adding together fragments of existing media, but in themselves constitute something new. 'Multimedia' is not like video, but equivalent to documentary, or the notion of installation. It is a set of novel potential and actual practices; not simply a technical invention.

• In addition, as Bill Green has pointed out (personal communication), case study too is a 'technology', especially in the way we use it as a way of organising our teaching. For we are not simply using 'case studies' as a means of illustrating concepts we have just taught, but as a device for smuggling an ideology, a set of theories and a set of practices (mostly about research, but also about teaching) into the course. The term 'case study', as we use it in our course, has a powerful hidden curriculum.

• The 'course team' too is a technology, in the sense that course organisation, curriculum, pedagogy and assessment are mediated and managed through i t - - i t is the primary means by which the university gets teaching done.

• The fact that the CDROM is designed for use within a distance program sets it in a context. This context is one in which educational technology is conventionally framed in particular ways (Evans & Nation 1989, Noble 1991). Whatever our intentions within the course team, the university frequently presents the innovation (especially to the outside the world) as evidence to justify its image of itself as innovative within this field. (A partial fiction in which we readily collude).

M u l t i m e d i a or m u l t i m e d i u m ? Digital technologies are inevitably plural~the 'Hathaway' CDROM is 'multimedia' in that it includes, video, images plus sound plus transcript, photographs, drawings, plans, 3D models and a range of formats- -academic writing, newspaper clips, observational video, TV news reports, letters, proposals, interviews, student writing, school documents, official records and forms, statistical data, street maps, faxes, diaries, architectural drawings etc etc.

We have come, though, to see this collection as constituting something beyond bricolage; for the ease of movement between items and between forms that digitisation allows in itself creates the basis of a new medium. Just as an orchestra becomes more than the sum of its instrumental parts, so multimedia can


be more than a collection of artefacts in different media. We tend to describe the CDROM in terms of what is familiar (as we have just done), but its novelty really lies in its holistic character; in its functionality. It is its search capabilities, its seamlessness and its capacity for generating the unexpected that define its distinctiveness. Practically, its non-linearity creates new demands on writer and reader; 'writing screens' (which could be video, photographic, audio, words, graphics) is (we have learnt) a distinctive discipline. There is a grammar and an aesthetic to be learnt and practiced which derives from other media but which, we believe, has a form of its own.

Case study as technology The Hathaway case study serves a particular educational purpose within the Changing Classrooms course. The course runs over a period of a year, and the case study constitutes one part of a three part curriculum. In designing the course we wanted to exemplify three different curriculum approaches within the course itself. We can describe these briefly as being: • A Training Model, in which students are required to complete a set of thirty,

closely specified classroom research tasks which provide a basic training in the methods of action research (though we rarely mention the term and there is not a spiral in sight);

• A Reflective Learning task 3, in which students are encouraged to read one book several times, slowly, and keep a reading log in which they record their responses to the text;

• A Case Study. The purposes of the case study are multiple but the basic assumption is that if learning from experience involves coming to terms with complex situations in which the available information is beyond assimilation, then one of the things we need to 'teach' is how to learn in the face of an overwhelming perception of reality. The case study reconstrues this educational problem in the form of a writing task.

In the past we have often defined case study in methodological terms, for instance as research on single instances (MacDonald & Walker 1975). However seeing case study as a technology rather than a methodology has the advantage that it switches attention away from inconsequential discussions of method (qualitative vs quantitative, structuralist vs post structuralist etc) and directs it to more direct and practical discussions about intention, audience, purpose and use

Distance education as technology Distance educators approach information technologies with ambiguous feelings. On the one hand, these technologies appear to promise a means of escape from

F L Y I N G IN THE F A C E OF I N S T R U C T I O N A L DESIGN 33

the constraints which have consigned distance education to a low status position within higher education. With universal access to the Internet, it appears possible to break the grip of print, the boredom of the lecture hall, the tyranny of distance, the oppression of the tutorial, and to replace them with (at least) a new set of cliches. On the other hand, we suspect that these promises are too readily adopted by academic administrators (who are themselves rarely educational users of the new media) and who have in mind other agenda, most of which are focussed on issues of efficiency and control. (As we write, one prominent Australian vice- chancellor is enthusiastically talking on the radio about the way her university is planning to use IT as a creative solution to the problem of managing conventionally unmanageable teaching loads.)

There are other signs that indicate that we seem to be on the edge of a 'virtual turn' in the practice of tertiary teaching. Distance education finds itself suddenly taken seriously by those who previously dismissed it; we are all suddenly expected to be able to teach 'flexibly'. However transient, it is clear that this turn is led by those with organisational (not educational) interests in mind. Expediency and efficiency are to the fore, and educational ideology pushed to the background.

Our location within an established (if somewhat battered) distance education context (an institution, a curriculum, a course, and a set of practices) inevitably leads us to confront the dominance, within educational technology, of the notion of 'Instructional Design'. We are well aware that 'Instructional Design' is interpreted and practiced much more loosely within our university than in many other settings (in commerce, industry and the military, for instance) but nevertheless it is there (often disguised, distorted, obscured or invisible) and needs to be addressed.

The nature of 'instructional design' All educational situations embody or imply their own rules and expectations about what is appropriate practice. Just as classrooms are set up in such a way that teachers and students entering them encounter expectations (about who talks and who listens, who questions and who answers, who moves and who sits, how, when and for how long people speak or write): so too each distance education 'setting' has its own conventions. These expectations are made explicit in the notion of 'Instructional Design', a term used in both a general and a technical way to describe the process of assembling, sequencing, presenting and assessing the effectiveness of the material which forms the basis of teaching. In this paper, we have used the term in its somewhat narrower sense as referring to a specific way of setting about doing this. 'Instructional design', as we use it here, is


narrower than terms like 'curriculum development', since it refers to the use and application of a specific, research-based body of knowledge and a derived set of precepts and practices intended to improve curriculum, teaching and assessment.

Usually kept hidden from the student, instructional design models provide course planners and teachers with the means for making teaching more efficient by tying its outcomes closely to the attainment of measurable objectives. While there are many variations in the process, course planning normally starts with identifying objectives, often on the basis of a prior task or skills analysis carried out at the site where the learner will eventually be located. Once objectives are clearly established, in as simple and unambiguous form as possible (itself a major task), then lesson content is written specifically to achieve each objective and tests devised for use in providing the student with regular and frequent feedback and as a means of course evaluation.

The rationale ?or instructional design models (see, for instance, Mager 1975, Dick & Carey 1990, Gagne 1979) derives from psychology, particularly from behavioural and cognitive learning theories, which can be used to develop learning programs aimed at specific objectives, themselves dependant on the notion of a 'taxonomy' of objectives. Such taxonomies (classically Bloom 1956- 64) imply that cognition can be treated as separate from affect and that some things, like rote learning, are more easily achieved than productive discussion, problem-solving or exercising judgement. Instructional design (sometimes referred to as 'objective-based learning') depends crucially on the specification of obtainable (often behavioural) objectives and on the associated technology of achievement testing.

The origins and development of instructional design lie mainly in military and industrial training (Noble 1991) and its application is clearly useful in teaching knowledge, skills and procedures across a wide range tasks. For instance, in the Royal Australian Navy (as in many other military settings), the same basic instructional design is used in training at all levels and in all specialist areas, including gunnery, navigation, dentistry, personnel management, PE, languages, cookery, communications etc etc.

Despite recent advances in psychology and the development of more complex and sophisticated learning theories, models of instructional design based on the setting of clear and specific objectives and subsequent achievement testing remain dominant in training. The basic idea is a simple one. If tasks are carefully enough analysed in terms of learning objectives, content well written and sequenced with the capabilities of the learner kept clearly in mind, and tests well constructed and well used, and if the overall program is carefully and continuously evaluated, then almost anything can be taught to almost anyone, given time, positive encouragement and practice.


It is worth noting that while instructional design principles have influenced schooling, this influence has been mostly peripheral, despite some well- publicised, and usually short-term, programs (mostly in the US). The reasons for the limited adoption of instructional design by schools are several, but one is obvious. Instructional design models are expensive to implement. They demand investment in an extensive and skilled infrastructure; the final product may look simple and straightforward to the learner, but this appearance is deceptive. The processes of task analysis, specification of objectives, materials development, instructor training, test development, and the trial and evaluation of the course are all demanding, time-consuming and beyond the reach of the lone classroom teacher. Applying the technology to the wide range of curriculum tasks faced by schools would probably double or even triple educational budgets. Instructional design has therefore been most commonly used in large organisations in which there is a need for uniformity of outcome, a stable and bounded curriculum and a hierarchy of responsibility, and in which the infrastructures to support the model are possible.

'Aims', but not 'objectives' In Changing Classrooms, and in the way we use the Hathaway case in particular, we have chosen not to specify learning objectives but to limit ourselves to setting educational aims. We have a diverse student group (from beginning teachers to experienced professionals, primary, secondary and adult educators from all specialisms and subject areas) and we see our educational task as encouraging them to develop their professional judgement through critical reflection. This is to invoke an educational process that is quite different from that of instructional models. It is not uniform. It builds on personal knowledge, taking bias, prejudice and self-delusion at face value. It is open-ended and context-bound. It seeks to provoke people to identify blind spots in their perceptions and so to extend their possibilities in practice (rather than to replace their routines with new behaviours).

One of the claims frequently made for instructional models is that, by insisting on the behavioural expression of outcomes, they always focus directly on what is learnt rather than on what is taught. But these outcomes are almost always defined by the instructor. A key issue in professional development is to get people to identify their own learning needs, a process that it is inevitably reflective and personal. Instructional design has the effect of making the curriculum objective, removing learning from areas of personal experience, and making it freely available to all who are willing to subject themselves to the process. (Its origins in military training are, as Noble has so clearly shown,

36 WALKER, LEWIS & LASKEY

deeply inscribed in its practices.) In professional education, our concern is less with behavioural outcomes and more with the improvement of professional judgement.

The nature of case study The basis of our curriculum is not a sequence of tasks calibrated to reach a specific behavioural outcome but a loosely structured resource collection we call a 'case study'. The term 'case study' too has a wider generally currency than we intend here. As we conceive it (and there are many ways in which case studies may be used), case studies present the learner with almost everything that instructional design says we should (at all costs) avoid.

Case studies intentionally provide much more information than the learner can manage or understand, and most of this information is fragmentary, unsystematic, ambiguous, unreliable, perhaps redundant, irrelevant or untrue. The learning tasks to which the material is aimed are often ill-defined and so difficult to assess. All the behind-scenes work done by course developers in the instructional design model is here left for the student to do, and so she frequently finds herself unsure of the task and overwhelmed by information, most of which seems partial, confusing, poorly arranged, and of doubtful reliability or validity.

This is what we like about case studies, they are like real life!

Against competency An instructional design model may be appropriate when we are trying to teach people particular responses to relatively technical problems but it requires that we are able to squeeze what we are trying to teach into a tight frame. In fact it is surprising just what diverse fields of knowledge can be made to fit the model, as military organisations have shown, often achieving success with the very people who ha~,e been failed by schools. However, there is a cost, for in some cases it is the very judgements and conceptual imagination that is required of instructional designers that are the things we want the learner, not the teacher, to learn.

While it presents itself as rational and straightforward, for the most part instructional design does not in itself model the ways in which teachers seem to learn (even though some might say that they should). Teachers, like other professionals and jpfs (Jean Lave's neat jargon acronym for 'just plain folks'), including parents, adults attempting to program the VTR, weekend chefs and gardeners, computer programmers, dancers, jazz musicians, beginning Morris dancers and supermarket shoppers, appear to learn more from experience than from instruction. Getting things wrong is often more instructive than getting


things right. Knowing you have got it wrong, with what consequences, and why, is usually memorable.

Teachers learn from the experience of teaching, of seeing others teach, from talking, reading and thinking about teaching (see, for instance Nias 1989). It follows that if we can find credible ways of simulating this experience of experience then we may be able to accelerate and extend the process of 'natural' learning, rather than imposing an over-rational, and inappropriate, frame upon it. At the heart of this effort lies a deep concern, not with 'competency', which is a relatively trivial educational aim, but with judgement.

Reflexivity and writing In devising a case, we must be sure that it seems real. Credibility is an important consideration, for if the case does not seem real then it will be difficult to engage reflexivity. Reflexivity is a key to understanding how we learn from cases/experience. It implies that we learn, not just from what we see and hear or read but from reflecting on what we feel, what we think and how we change as we learn. Hence writing is an important element in learning from cases, because in writing we have to make our own sense of things: we have to engage our own

4 subjectivity in the process .

Case study and distance learning We believe that to change teaching we must touch the teacher and this, we have found, means touching the person; for the teachers we are, in many respects, are the people we are (and perhaps the reverse too). Moreover, for learning to be more than superficial it must be not just subjective but also memorable. We have probably all at some time taken part in simulation exercises which were engaging at the time, fun to take part in, but from which we learnt little that endures. For case studies to be effective, they must be more than superficial, they must cut deeper than the role, so as to engage person, and they must create enduring memories, for only then will they become part of the sum total of what we call 'our experience'.

It will be clear that the notion of learning implicit in this approach is somewhat different from the theories of learning implicit in instructional design models. Learning from experience is not a free gift! For we learn, not from experience itself, but from the work we put into understanding the meanings that

5 experience has for us . In this we cannot put personality to one side as a set of contingent variables. In learning from experience/case studies, the person who is the learner should be at the centre of the process, not to one side of it. Not


everyone will learn the same things, to the same level and in the same ways. Much of what we learn will be about how we learn, and about ourselves, and others, as learners, and it will be coded in our memories as tacit rather than propositional knowledge. When we are successful, our course will provide the ground for the telling of stories, for our students will build the experience of the course into the narratives of their lives. We will do so, too.

We have come to believe, from our experience in the use of case studies in professional education, that there is an implied assumption that the learning that occurs is not abstracted curriculum knowledge but in the form of learning from someone. If we are to engage the learner as a person, then the teacher must be someone too.

At first sight, this flies in the face of the conventions of distance learning, for the term itself seems to define the teacher as a person out of consideration. The very fact that there is little room for face-to-face interaction is read by many as depersonalising the process. Our experience has been the opposite. We have come to believe that, in fact, there is a greater potential for intimacy in distance relationships than there is in the seminar room. (This should not surprise anyone who has ever read a book, watched a film, had a telephone conversation, or corresponded on the internet).

In all face-to-face contact, but especially in teaching, most of us self-censor and selectively project aspects of ourselves to a remarkable extent (to the point where we often no longer realise that this is what we are doing). In classrooms this is markedly so; indeed, for many young teachers 'learning to teach' means extensively (and sometimes painfully) self-editing their presentation of self in order to amplify and project a very limited range of their potential selves. Perhaps paradoxically, then, distance programs have more scope for engaging more of the person in the process of professional development than does conventional teaching.

Assessment versus reflexivity Assessment plays a large part in instructional design. The technology of test construction is highly developed, even if in practice it is often misused. Testing is of very limited value in the face of the aims we have set for ourselves because it removes responsibility for evaluation from the student, when what is important for the learner to develop is the capacity to test their understanding for themselves. This is not easy to achieve, but in sharing what they learn, they may come to a greater understanding than they can realise alone.

In contrast with instructional design models, case studies emphasise reflexivity, they draw on and attempt to integrate with prior learning, and they

F L Y I N G IN T H E F A C E OF I N S T R U C T I O N A L D E S I G N

take a view of knowledge as subjective (and hence value-related) rather than as objective and value-free (or 'technical'). Implicit in the idea of learning from case studies is that learning is a social rather than an individual experience, that the learner is best placed to evaluate what they have learned (and has a responsibility to do so), and that this is best organised with groups or teams rather than individuals in mind.

While case studies seem to fit well with our ideas about how teachers learn, there are a number of important considerations that need to be kept in mind:

• What you learn from case studies/experience cannot be pre-specified or easily generalised.

• What you learn (how much and how well) will depend mostly on the questions you bring to the case, your persistence in pursing these questions and your imaginative capacity to transform them.

• Your tutor/teacher/instructor may often seem evasive when you ask just what you must do and what you should learn (eg when you ask for the objectives of the exercise). They are not being evasive; they do not and cannot know the correct answers, for there are none (though there are some that may be incorrect).

• In terms of feedback you should invite, expect and welcome critique but, since there are no right answers, correction should be restricted to factual questions. The aim of the tutor should be to help you sharpen your interpretations and analyses, suggest ways you might develop them, counter assertions you might make, stretch the logic of your arguments and comment on the way you organise and present your work.

• Instructional design models tend to assume that what is correct is also true and right. Case study methods thrive on drawing distinctions between these different judgements.

Case studies: frequently raised objections Just as instructional design models conflate learning models with approaches to teaching, assuming that a positivist, empiricist way of thinking about one also provides the best way to approach the other, so too does case study. The differences between the two are therefore, in part, about different views of science, different ways of looking at the world and acting within it. It follows that many of the objections that are raised to case study methods of teaching derive from objections to case study as a method of research. Thus:


Case studies are not scientific, only anecdotal Case studies are often seen to be only stories, everyday happenings presented in everyday language. At best they are descriptive but made complicated by the idiosyncrasies and variability of human social behaviour. William Ferguson (undated) has described this approach to teaching as 'Aesopic' (in contrast to teaching which is 'Socratic').

Case studies are not objective The pursuit of objectivity has long been an aim of science, especially in its struggle to disentangle itself from religious dogma. Social science for many years followed the trail first made by science, but in doing so has created a position for itself as somehow outside the social contexts of human activity. How social science comes to terms with itself as both about social action and inevitably a

• . , 6 form of social action has been a long runmng debate which is far from resolved . In educational research, this debate often surfaces in the form of a relatively

superficial debate between 'quantitative' and 'qualitative' approaches to research. 'Objectivity' is sometimes claimed as a consequence of adopting accepted conventions and procedures, but to do this is to hide the issue rather than to resolve it. Objectivity, as journalists and other writers know, is the consequence of a struggle to understand, not a consequence of acquiescence to convention. Objectivity and subjectivity are therefore best thought of, not as alternatives, but as two sides of the same coin. Objectivity results, not from the denial of subjectivity, but as 'conscious control of relevant biases' (CARE undated). Madeline Sarup extends the point, arriving at 'discourse' as the ground within which these issues are to be played out:

One Lacanian tenet is that subjectivity is entirely relational; it only comes into play through the principle of difference, by the opposition of the 'other' or the 'you' to the 'I '. In other words, subjectivity is not an essence but a set of relationships. It can only be induced by the activation of a signifying system which exists before the individual and which is determined by his or her cultural identity. Discourse, then, is the agency whereby the subject is produced and the existing order sustained (Sarup 1988, p. 29, quoted by Davies 1993, p. 10).

You cannot generalise from a case study It is sometimes seen to be a constraint of case studies that they arc locked in the particularities of the instant and the idiosyncrasies of individuals, and so unable to provide knowledge that is transferable or capable of generating theory. In the


context of the problems of education, especially education within large and complex organisations, this is of course also their strength. Case studies that are more than superficial have the capacity to stall any attempts that are made to generalise or theorise from a narrow conceptual base. Case studies are best used to counter generalisations, not to illustrate, exemplify or support them. What is most powerful about case study research is that it makes generalisation from the case more difficult, not that it makes it easier.

Case study research is not ethical Most research organisations nowadays require researchers to conform to conventions developed to protect human subjects. The spirit of these conventions cuts across many of the aspirations and assumptions made in case study research. For instance, the conventions expect data on individuals to be anonymised and generalised; case study research is often concerned with the shifting boundaries between what is personal and what is public, with identifying actions that are defined by roles and action that springs from the motivations, concerns and commitments of the person taking (and remaking) the role.

Case studies are always about other people's problems, not mine Where simulated experiences, such as those provided by aircraft simulators, are quickly adopted by most participants as 'real', case studies of social situations are more difficult to create. They can take you up close to others, allowing you to experience vicariously their world, putting yourself in positions where you experience dilemmas as they experience them, but equally they can be used to create dis tance~providing wooden descriptions of situations which we find unbelievable or in which we see all those in the case as foolish, inept or acting unethically. Creating cases is therefore something of an art, and judging quite how complicated and ambiguous to make the information we present is always a difficult decision, since it requires us to balance verisimili tude and comprehension.

Often, conveying the 'reality' of the case is less important when we are dealing with social situations, because our aim is not primarily to create a believable mock-up but to provide the basis for analysis and discussion. The Hathaway case is like this, in that we are aiming to create a situation in which you feel you 'know' the school and can discuss it with some understanding of its complexity. Giving you the feeling that you are actually in a classroom or walking down a corridor is not so important as giving you the capacity to resist simple interpretations of the school. In relating to you as the user of the CDROM, our primary concern is with your thinking, rather than with providing the illusion


of you being in the here-and-now of the classroom, the corridor, the playground or the staffroom.

Case studies are always conservative Good case studies, we believe, are those which present a picture that is complex and resists simple interpretation. It follows that they also tend to resist radical analysis or prescription. The more you know and understand about a situation, institution or organisation, the more difficult it is to change it. For every change you might suggest has to be seen in a complex social context; a system within which even small changes may have complex and amplified consequences.

Not a summary, but a thought to be going on with Implicit in what we have written is the assumption that our aim is not to achieve learning. We tell our students that our aim is not that you should know 'more', but that you should improve your capacity for judgement in relation to your professional work as a teacher, ie that you should 'know better'. Learning, in this sense, is not replicable, and the best we can hope for is to come to terms with the limitations of our capacity to learn from our experience. If this is what we hope for our students, we need, necessarily, to apply the same principle to our own practice. Unlike conventional instructional design, we need to resist the temptation to engineer closure. Samuel Beckett says it more clearly than we ever could:

To know that you can do better next time, unrecognisably better, and that there is no next time, and that it is a blessing that there is not, there is a thought to be going on with.

Acknowledgments We would like to thank those who worked with us on the development of the 'Hathaway' CDROM, especially Peter Evans, Glenn McNolty, Ian Fox, Caroline Coles and Peter Lane. We are grateful to Deakin University for two teaching development grants which helped us develop the 'Hathaway Project' and especially to Diana Thompson, Dale Holt and Kim Morgan for their continuous encouragement. We would also like to thank Steve Wilkinson of RAN for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and Chris Saville, Susan Groundwater Smith, Alistair Morgan, Bev Dunbar, Fiona Henderson and Frances Hay, all of whom have been involved with the project at various times.


Notes Sample pages, a description of the CDROM and a continuing discussion about uses of the mater ial can be found at the fol lowing web page: http://www2.deakin.edu.au/SDG/hathaway/hathaway.htm/

2 This phrase has been part of Deakin's educational rhetoric since the early 1980s, when Fred Jevons, then Vice Chancellor, used it to define what he saw as the main constraint facing developments in distance education, once the 'tyranny of distance' was overcome.

3 This task has been developed by Helen Modra, who has explained the rationale elsewhere (Modra 1989).

4 Pennycook (1995), writing about contemporary post-colonial literature, makes a strong case for the use of language (and English in particular) to 'write back', taking his cue from Salman Rushdie, who sees English as a medium in which the empire can 'write back', to the centre.

5 We have extended this discussion in Schratz & Walker (in press). 6 An extended elaboration of this point can be found in Schratz & Walker 1995.

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Documents

Flying in the face of instructional design: Rationale for the case study